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| Cooper's Hawk – a common backyard bird in Tucson |
This year’s
Tucson Valley Christmas Bird Count will be held on Sunday, December 15, so mark
your calendars. The CBC period runs from December 14-January 5 every year, and
the compiler for each CBC can choose any day during that period to conduct his
or her count, but it seems to have worked fine for Tucson Valley in the past
few years to hold it on the first Sunday of the period, the day after the
neighboring Catalina Mountains CBC is usually held.
Our count
last year came up with some exciting results, including a near-record number of
species and by far a record high number of participants. Comparing the numbers
of each species from year to year and discovering trends or unexpected changes
is always a fun exercise, but one could take forever to try to unravel what
each number means.
More fun is
just to measure up our success compared to other counts nationwide and try to
beat some records. This past year we broke the all-time national high count for
two species, something rarely done by any CBC these days – after all, there
have been 114 years of record keeping. Cooper’s
Hawk, having increased greatly in Tucson over the past 15 years showed no change
in this trend, and we saw 105. By
comparison, the next closest CBC was San Diego with a still-impressive 44. The
other all-time high was Vermilion
Flycatcher with 190, blowing the old record of 118 clear out of the water (and
the runner-up last year was Gila River with only 40). This species doesn’t seem
to have a long-term trend in Tucson, and although numbers have been increasing
over the past few years, the huge jump last year was rather a surprise.
We had the
highest count nationwide for six additional species and tied with 2 more, which
gives Tucson Valley a total of 10 national highs last year. These final 8
species were (with the next-highest number and CBC name in parentheses):
Gila Woodpecker
820 (357, Carefree)
Plumbeous
Vireo 19 (12, Long Beach-el Dorado)
Cassin's
Vireo 4 (4, Dudleyville)
Verdin 797
(273, Carefree)
Chestnut-sided
Warbler 2 (2, San Diego)
Yellow-headed
Blackbird 13600 (7509, El Paso)
Lesser
Goldfinch 1739 (1143, Putah Creek)
Lawrence's
Goldfinch 246 (72, Nogales)
Join us this
coming SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15 for another
fun count and potluck species countdown at the end of the day.
